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Meta's glasses privacy platform goes to auditors before it goes to wearers
Private Processing, the siloed cloud scheme Meta built for WhatsApp last year, is coming to Ray-Ban Meta glasses so the assistant can work on data Meta says it cannot read. Meta's engineering director told WIRED he does not have a timeline.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- At its annual Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, Meta said it plans to bring Private Processing, its siloed AI processing scheme, to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
- Meta built the scheme for WhatsApp and its Meta AI app last year, where it helped enable WhatsApp's Incognito Chat alongside end-to-end encrypted messaging.
- The feature is not on the glasses yet, and Meta engineering director Pritam Shah told WIRED he does not have a timeline for when it will be added.
- Meta's Muse agent, launched earlier this month, runs in a cloud environment called Secure VM, and a planned Confidential VM version carries a similar inaccessible-to-Meta promise; Muse is also coming to the glasses.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint The guarantee attaches to the wearer's requests and data. The people who have been confronting wearers and installing detector apps are objecting to being captured, and nothing in a cloud-processing guarantee gives them a check they can run.
- decision Anyone writing a glasses policy for an office, a school or a clinic this quarter cannot make Private Processing a condition of approval, because no glasses feature uses it and Meta has not named the ones that will.
- exposure By announcing before shipping features, Meta has put the inaccessible-to-Meta claim in front of the security and privacy communities and a named category of third-party auditor. Until one of them publishes, the claim rests on Meta's own description.
- precedent With two Meta systems now carrying the same promise, buyers should expect confidential-compute language to be the standard answer whenever Meta hardware draws a privacy complaint.
Ask your glasses to summarize the conversation you are in and two people's speech goes to a cloud service. One of them bought the glasses. Meta's press release names those uses directly, writing that AI glasses "have the capacity to provide superpowers like translating a conversation or summarizing notes or a conversation" [2]. Private Processing is designed to keep that processing away from all outside parties, Meta included [3]. It covers the wearer's data [4].
The people who generated this year's backlash are mostly not wearers. WIRED reports months of controversy over Meta's use of face-recognition technology and over worries that the glasses could be used to arm sexual predators [12]. Some have dubbed them "pervert glasses" and confronted people wearing them, and others built apps like ZuckOff to detect Meta's smart glasses nearby [13]. A person in frame cannot opt into Private Processing and has no way to check it.
What Meta put on stage is the architecture plus an invitation to inspect it. "We have the platform ready. We have it working. It's not just a white paper and a blog," Pritam Shah, Meta's director of engineering, told WIRED [8][9]. He said the timing is deliberate: "The reason why we are announcing it right now, before putting more experiences on this platform, is so that we can start working with the security community and the privacy community and a third-party auditor" [10].
Announcing before shipping gives outside reviewers something to look at early. Anyone writing a device policy this quarter has nothing to test. Meta has not said which glasses features Private Processing will support [6]. Of the uses being floated, Shah said: "These are not concrete features coming, but these are some examples" [11]. No glasses feature uses the platform yet [15].
Meta set out its own goal as a question in the press release: "How do you build a hyper-personalized AI that knows your world deeply with enhanced privacy?" [17] The answer on offer is a cloud environment Meta's own staff cannot read into, a promise now attached to two Meta systems [16].
Before that language reaches a procurement form, be clear about whose data the guarantee covers, the wearer's or the bystander's. Be clear too about which stage the guarantee has reached: stated, shipped, or audited by someone who publishes a scope. Here the data is the wearer's, and the stage is stated.
What to watch
- Who the third-party auditor is, and whether its report names the scope it actually checked.
- A feature list and a date for Private Processing on the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
- Whether Confidential VM ships under Muse on the glasses with the same inaccessible-to-Meta claim.